To 50,000

Most influential preacher in the U. S. is a fuzzy-haired, magnetic man who was ordained a Baptist, for the past ten years has been a sectless theological liberal. Last February Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick preached in his Riverside Church in Manhattan a sermon entitled: "Dare We Break the Vicious Circle of Fighting Evil With Evil!" The sermon was later read by Dr. Fosdick's good friend and chief parishioner, John D. Rockefeller Jr., builder of the soaring, carillonned, $4,000,000 church, which he provided as Dr. Fosdick's spiritual home when the evangelical U. S. churches proved too confining for the Buffalo-born minister.

Soberly and at length, Mr. Rockefeller pondered Dr. Fosdick's words. Last week he had 50,000 copies of them distributed among U. S. businessmen, labor leaders, Congressmen. In a covering note he wrote: "This sermon ... is one of the most arresting utterances in connection with the gradual drift of the world toward a great conflagration that has come to my attention. . . ."

Excerpts from the sermon: "What apes we are! We copy those we hate. We fight evil with evil and become the evil that we fight. ... All this we do, thinking Jesus to be a visionary idealist. He is not. His ethic shows a more realistic insight into what is going on in this modern world than does our boasted hardheadedness. . . .

"They make war! We make war! . . . They say, All restrictions off on the most brutal instincts of mankind! We say the same, until once more . . . far from conquering our enemies we let them make us after their own image. So at long last, at the end of a ruinous era, we shall be facing again the question--which God grant us grace to face now before it is too late--'How can Satan cast out Satan?' "

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